Fiery Magic and Gold at the Segerstrom Concert Hall

Aubree Oliverson plays Korngold’s Violin Concerto with the Pacific Symphony under its Artistic and Music Director Designate, Alexander Shelley.

REVIEW

Pacific Symphony Orchestra, Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, Costa Mesa

DAVID J BROWN

From the distance of what is now well over a century, it’s easy to bracket together Stravinsky’s three early ballets, Firebird (1909-1910), Petrushka (1910-1911), and The Rite of Spring (1911-1913), and indeed they were collectively the launchpad for his subsequent 50-year-long compositional career, whose unpredictably mercurial metamorphoses formed a key thread in the development of 20th century “classical” music, and a legacy for and influence on many composers that continues to this day.

Stravinsky by Jacques-Émile Blanche, 1915.

Nonetheless, the concert-hall fates of the three ballets have been rather different. The Rite of Spring has become a favorite for orchestras to show off their virtuoso chops if they can muster its huge forces (perhaps the one piece of “modern music” as guaranteed to fill a hall as a Brahms or Beethoven symphony), and Petrushka turns up fairly frequently, usually in Stravinsky’s more modestly scored 1946 revision. Firebird, however—half as long in duration as either—is much more often represented by one or other of the suites that he drew from it.

Stravinsky well knew what he was doing when, first in 1911, then 1919, and finally 1945, he extracted the immediately memorable “plums” from the score, and the contrast between these set-pieces and the many, often purely textural, passages that link them tasks any conductor to present the complete Firebird as a compelling and integrated whole in concert, divorced from any representation of the scenario it was originally written to accompany. 

This was the challenge for the Pacific Symphony’s Artistic and Music Director Designate, Alexander Shelley, in the February concert of the Orchestra’s 2025-26 season, and from the very start he got it right. The muted pianissimo cello and bass undulations that begin the Introduction can feel static and even aimless if taken too slowly and without tight rhythmic control; here their steady forward motion was all ominous purpose, enhanced by the (for once) clearly audible bass drum roll that underpins them.

Alexander Shelley.

From here on the ballet’s many linking sections flowed seamlessly together so that nowhere was there any sense of waiting for the movements so well known in Stravinsky’s suites, from the Firebird’s Dance through to the simply thrilling account of the Finale (which, oddly, he omitted from the 1911 suite).

The performance of course benefited from the Segerstrom Hall’s acoustic, so that the myriad threads and colors of the young composer’s astonishingly imaginative scoring came across with almost hallucinatory vividness in the Pacific Symphony’s deployment of Firebird’s full and “wastefully large” (as the composer described it in old age) orchestra, including quadruple woodwind, multiple percussion, three harps, and briefly deployed but clearly audible offstage brass.

It was perhaps ironic that for a performance so convinced and cogent that it could well have stood without any visual element—other than perhaps supertitles of the 22 sections—Mr. Shelley and the Pacific Symphony chose to accompany it with a full-length animation commissioned from the small Californian studio Fowler Amusement Co., who averred that "… for the look of the Firebird projected media, we drew inspiration from theater, dance, and classic illustrations of NC Wyeth, Arthur Rackham, and Howard Pyle…” 

In contrast to Disney's invented scenario for the Firebird Suite in the final segment of its Fantasia 2000 follow-up to the celebrated 1940 original, Fowler's animation followed the ballet’s narrative fairly faithfully. At its best it was spot-on, as with the Firebird itself (above) and the gorgeously swirling semi-abstractions into which the realistic main action devolved from time to time. And it wasn’t at all a bad thing that the rather jerky movement of the human figures had a marionette-like feel, nor was the way Koschei’s castle sometimes recalled Sauron’s realm from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. Altogether it was a highly successful experiment and the capacity audience loved it.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold in 1940.

Before the interval the main work was Korngold’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35, the enthusiastic championing of which the young American violinist Aubree Oliverson made clear in her pre-concert chat with KUSC host Alan Chapman.

That her technique was also well up to both the work’s passionate lyricism and its rapid-fire intricacies was made clear by her collaboration with Shelley and the Pacific Symphony in a performance that demonstrated how skillfully Korngold built a large-scale and entirely convincing concerto from movie music elements across all three of its movements.

Though the work is notably economical in woodwind and brass (only one trombone!), the score includes all the untuned and tuned percussion and lavishly elaborate string writing that make Korngold’s sound world so memorable. From the outset the Segerstrom’s wonderful acoustic projected all the exquisite pointillism of celesta, harp, glockenspiel, and vibraphone that clothe the violin’s rhapsodic flights.

Aubree Oliverson.

Ms. Oliverson’s absolute security, including some thrillingly attenuated phrase-ends at the edge of audibility, worked as one with the plentiful rubato of Shelley’s conducting, which managed at once to feel freely spontaneous yet have sure goal-centered purpose. It was a marvelous performance of a great concerto that has, thank goodness, thoroughly establshed itself in the repertoire. For an encore, Aubree Oliverson gave us her own arrangement of Menuhin Caprice (2021) by Mark O'Connor.

John Adams in 1982.

The concert opener was John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986), written when he was a leading proponent in the backlash of minimalism against musical modernism and before he grew to seniority in the established American musical scene. It has remained one of his most-performed works. With some recordings in mind, I thought the opening wood-block ticking too loud, but no, forte is the marking, and under Mr. Shelley’s urgent baton its pervading presence (I wonder if maintaining that rhythmic constancy is as taxing for a player as the side-drum in Ravel’s Bolero?) drove Adams’ very large forces through four minutes of ear-pounding unanimity.

To someone who has never been much of an Adams fan nor of minimalism in general—all that repetitiveness sounding like preparation for something that never quite happens—the key word in the work’s title is “short.” Nonetheless the aspiring trumpet phrase that emerges around three minutes in was certainly frisson-inducing, and this exhilarating account signaled the magnificent playing to come. Short Ride in a Fast Machine was written originally as the second of Two Fanfares for Orchestra and, if preceded in concert by its slower companion, Tromba Lontana, the diptych would be more than the sum of its parts and still not outstay its welcome as a concert opener.

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Pacific Symphony Orchestra, Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Costa Mesa, Thursday, January 15, 2026, 8 p.m.

Images: The performance: Doug Gifford; Stravinsky, Korngold: Wikimedia Commons; Firebird animation: Fowler Animation; Adams: LA Philharmonic archives.

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